Impulse

As a exer­cise, I’ve been rewrit­ing Return of the Jedi. The char­ac­ter­i­za­tions in this movie needs some work — Han Solo was a wimp and Darth Vader was prac­ti­cally friendly. My hope is to return these char­ac­ters to their Empire Strikes Back glory. As I began dis­as­sem­bling the struc­ture of the script, deter­min­ing the causes for each event, the moti­va­tions of the char­ac­ters, etc, a cer­tain curios­ity began to knock about my mind: Can I get rid of these overly cute Ewoks? Now, that’s some­thing worth doing! To my sur­prise, the task is harder than it seems.

The script for Jedi is very tight and well struc­tured. Change one thing, and oth­ers quickly fall apart. For exam­ple, take the egre­gious case of Lando — We are asked to believe that the Rebellion would, in their most des­per­ate hour, not only enlist Lando — a lying smug­gler baron who sold key rebel­lion offi­cers to the Empire — but that they’d eagerly make him a gen­eral based on some rumor that he’d been clever once. On the other hand, if you loose this bit, who’s going to fly the sex­i­est ship in the galaxy dur­ing the biggest bat­tle in his­tory? Wedge???
The Ewoks are even more solidly welded to the struc­ture of the movie. Although they are annoy­ingly cute and an obvi­ous pan­der to younger view­ers, they are the clincher; the Secret Weapon every Sci-Fi or spy movie has ever used. Without them, the Rebellion would have been crushed and I wouldn’t have both­ered see­ing it three times in one week.
Remember that the whole plot cen­ters around a trap: The Emperor has arranged every­thing to bring the entire Rebellion to a sin­gle place where they can be crushed by the full force of the Imperial fleet and the Death Star Ray Gun v2.0.
The Emperor is no slouch — this is the guy who, through schem­ing and plot­ting, single-handedly over­threw the old repub­lic, mas­sa­cred the Jedi, and built a pow­er­ful mil­i­tary machine to cement his posi­tion. That’s a pretty impres­sive resume demon­strat­ing some finely honed skills: per­sua­sion, strat­egy, pol­i­tics, and above all, thor­ough­ness. Now add the fact that he’s a Sith Lord with voodoo pow­ers of clair­voy­ance, and you’ve got some pretty amaz­ing atten­tion to detail. This guy has thought of every­thing. That’s why he knows he’s going to win, and that’s why we believe him. (And we’ve got to believe him if the movie’s going to be any fun).
The Ewoks earn their Secret Weapon badges because they are the one force that the most metic­u­lous ruler in his­tory might over­look: they’re a bunch of fur­balls with pointy sticks after all. What harm could they do? Heck, the Emperor prob­a­bly tor­tured a few of them for enter­tain­ment. They were over­looked, and indeed they tipped the power bal­ance towards the Rebels when they helped a wookie climb into an AT-ST.
So, if we loose the Ewoks, we loose our Secret Weapon, and we loose our happy end­ing. There are plenty of stan­dard tricks we could employ here — Rebels tak­ing advan­tage of Imperial cor­rup­tion, or ally­ing with some well-placed, sym­pa­thetic Imperial — but those are even more unpleas­ant. You’ve got to hand it to Lucas, hav­ing teddy bears over­throw the ulti­mate Machiavellian is pretty cre­ative — even if it is cute.
Personally, I think it’d be more inter­est­ing if the Emperor’s error were in under­es­ti­mat­ing the char­ac­ter of a man — or maybe men: Luke and Han. While I’d love to have Han save the day, it wouldn’t really be Return of the Jedi, would it? It wouldn’t fit the greater arc of the Jedi & Skywalker fam­ily.
Maybe if R2 had a ring that he had to destroy…